These are the 10 most addictive drugs in the world

There are a lot of misconceptions about drugs. But to develop
smart drug policies and figure out how to deal with health issues
related to drug use, we need accurate information.

That need for accurate information is what drove British
psychiatrist David Nutt to
develop scales to assess exactly how dangerous and addictive
drugs actually are.

For a
2007 study published in The Lancet, Nutt convened two groups
of independent experts to rate the addictiveness and harmfulness
of 20 different drugs (the ratings of one group of psychiatrists
were used to corroborate the assessment of a larger group).

Addiction was measured using three components: how pleasurable a
using a substance was, how much psychological dependence it
induced, and how physically dependent it made its users.

Experts rated each variable on a scale of 0 to 3. Based on that
scale, these are the 10 most addictive drugs:

Skye Gould/Tech Insider

As you can see, heroin was by far the most addictive, scoring a
three in terms of the pleasure it gave users and hitting the same
high score for causing physical and psychological dependence.

As the study points out, it's interesting that legal status
doesn't necessarily have anything to do with addictiveness or
harm. Tobacco and alcohol both rank fairly high in terms of
addictiveness but remain legal, while other illegal substances
like cannabis, LSD, and ecstasy fell lower on the list.

You can check out Nutt's
full analysis of the harm and addictiveness ratings of drugs
in Table 3 of the study; he calculated the mean score
of each of the three variables (pleasure, psychological
dependence, and physical dependence) rather than adding them up
as we did here.